In meeting with a half dozen top health IT leaders last summer, I was surprised at the level of skepticism for Watson delivering value in medical diagnosis support. I don't expect Watson to make a diagnostic judgment, but does it seem far-fetched for such technology to have some role in suggesting probable diagnoses and treatments?

From business and revenue point of view, IBM is moving to a new area. I am not sure if this technology, though remarkable, can generate enough revenue to sustain growth of large company, like IBM. As IBM moving to a higher spectrum of technology for buisness growth, I am afraid they might neglect the base technology that supports the IBM's business revenue, growth and the customer satisfaction that comes with it.

And then John Conner and Arnold Schwarzenegger will beam back from the future and do battle to destroy the chip that IBM invents that thinks like a human and takes over the world... sorry, wrong story line.

Some day in the future.. 20 - 30 years?? both waves will merge into a super network of super smart, self learning, computers. They will learn from each other. New standards of information exchange will be developed. At some point, it will be on its own able to think and grow exponentially a million times faster than a human. The curve of AI will be a straight vertical line. Good? Bad? time will tell but it will happen.

IBM Watson operates on a higher plane. It is a cut above. It is a game changer. Each IBM Watson advancement represents the successful completion of a Grand Challenge including Blue Gene with its computational speed, Deep Blue with its demonstrated mastery of chess, Jeopardy with its lightening quick and accurate quiz game responses, cognitive computing and the promise of deep semantic discovery, cognitive systems now the inflection point of broad useful application, and the next challenge on the horizon which is to pass the U.S. Medical Examination.

The question here is whether IBM Watson could be a game changing advancement in Program Acquisition for so long an area of unmet need and Supply Chain Risk Management Assurance now the center of risk and uncertainty in national security and global competitiveness in a shrinking globalized world.

I know this because IBM is putting money into the success cognitive computing, and the IBM CEO is beeting her job on it.

If successful, the biggest news is that IBM is plowin this field by itself so as a minimum it will have a ten year leap over the competitiion.

IBM Watson operates on a higher plane. It is a cut above. It is a game changer. Each IBM Watson advancement represents the successful completion of a Grand Challenge including Blue Gene with its computational speed, Deep Blue with its demonstrated mastery of chess, Jeopardy with its lightening quick and accurate quiz game responses, cognitive computing and the promise of deep semantic discovery, cognitive systems now the inflection point of broad useful application, and the next challenge on the horizon which is to pass the U.S. Medical Examination.

The organizations to watch may not be tech companies but tech consumers such as the CIA, which continues to use vast computing power to identify relevant signals in an ever changing world of data noise. The fact that the CIA chose Amazon Web Services over IBM for a $600 million cloud infrastructure contract is telling: Even with IBM's leadership with Watson and cognitive computing, there are other factors at play in arriving at useful answers.

I'm also skeptical that by vacuuming up data from the Internet of Everything, that Salesforce will be able to deliver much more than just a lot of data about data.

Here's the link: I don't think we'll be able to wring full value out of the connected computing world without cognitive computing, machine learning, whatever you want to call it. The Internet of things creates just too many data points to consider all the possible connections to analyze. In that way it's a classic IBM play: yes, we all see this big idea out there, you'll need our stuff to actually do what you imagine.

Seems like every few years, some variation of AI is going to be The Next Big Thing, claiming that within a few years, we will have full on thinking computers that don't require any programming blah blah blah.

Call me a cynic, but I have heard this song too many times to buy into it.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.